FINALLY, AFTER three water less days since last Thursday night our household – and probably the rest of the houses with water connections from the Davao City Water District in nearby villages served by the Riverside Water System – had our first drop roughly between 2 to 3 o’clock last Sunday afternoon. Thank God and the men of the water firm who labored in doing what they call “maintenance servicing” on DCWD’s Riverside Water System facilities including the conked out Well No. 2.
As we said earlier in this same space we understand that services of utility companies like the DCWD will falter every now and then. And at times the repairs will take time to undertake causing the outage to be much longer thus bringing inconvenience to consumers. In the case of water service interruptions we have noticed that in the past few months more areas in the city had been announced to experience interruptions. Lately it was the Riverside connected barangays in Tugbok and Calinan districts where unfortunately we had been living since the CoViD 19 pandemic until now.
Our primary complaint since the start of what DCWD calls as “rotating water service interruption” was the timeliness of its giving the advisory, the consistency and its lack of adherence to the schedule announced. All of these inadequacies caught us totally unprepared. First it was text-blasted very late at night just as the water was already gone from the faucets. Then the water firm announced a revised schedule for the so-called availability of water in our place. But still the water did not come. Yet, the firm’s communicators have the gall to advise consumers in the affected areas to “store water” when the time frame will not anymore allow and there was already nothing to store at all.
It is this apparent weakness in that aspect of the water agency’s service that we feel should be largely improved if it has to remain in the hearts of the Davaoenos the quasi-government corporation had been serving all these years.
If the firm continues to ignore the growing dissatisfaction of the water consuming public, we are certain in the not-so-distant future it will suffer the brunt of the people’s anger. So do will the Davaoenos’ representative to the local government’s policy-making body who will continue to keep their ears deaf from the increasing decibel of their constituents’ complaints of the deteriorating water service or lack of it.
*****************************
There are two national government agencies whose laudable programs are being used for political purpose by some “favored” candidates in the coming Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (BSK) elections. We do not know if the leadership of these agencies at both the national and regional levels knows about this and just tolerate the same.
On the whole the said programs of the agencies involve millions of pesos – even billions all over the country. And the way the money is disposed of does not even get some work done for the government. It is purely for the benefit of the favored candidates to the barangay polls.
It is very sad to note that funds for programs intended to augment the livelihood of the disadvantaged Filipinos go to the pockets of the favored few.
Should we be surprised if the same corrupt kind of barangay officials will be at the helm of barangay governments after the elections?\\
